Stir in tomato paste and cook until incorporated, about 2 minutes. Add peanut butter and cook until oil separates from peanut butter, about 5 minutes. Add stock and stir, making sure to bring up all the tomato paste and peanut butter from the bottom of the saucepan so it is well blended. Increase heat to medium high to bring sauce to a simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 45 minutes. Remove bay leaf. Using a stick immersion blender, puree sauce in pan until smooth.

In an 8-quart pot, bring water to a boil, salt it, and cook noodles according to package directions. Drain and add noodles to peanut sauce, tossing to coat. Plate noodles and top with edamame. Serves 6 to 8.

West African peanut sauce: The carbonara of half the world

There are some things you just won’t learn at cooking school, said JJ Johnson in Between Harlem and Heaven (Flatiron Books). The peanut sauce below “tastes good on everything,” and when Alexander Smalls and I were developing a menu for a Harlem restaurant that would celebrate the culinary heritage of the African diaspora, we started to realize that it belongs in the same company as béchamel, hollandaise, and the other “mother sauces” of French cuisine that every Culinary Institute of America student learns. Consider it an “Afro-Asian version of carbonara,” a foundational sauce that also embodies the magic that occurred when the African diaspora and Asian diaspora crisscrossed centuries ago, changing the way much of the world cooked. We think of it as “the Mother Africa sauce.”

In Brazil, the Japanese and African communities live very close together, and both eat a peanut butter and tomato sauce on udon noodles. But this is a sauce to use on five straight days in five different ways. “You can pour it over a bowl of rice. You can dice up a sweet potato and mix it in as a stew,” and “it tastes delicious with the meat of the chicken thigh crumbled into the mix.” ■